Sun & Spoon Read Free Page A

his.
    Joanie squeezed Spoon’s palm. “Why did we call Gram Gram, but we call Evie Evie?”
    Spoon flicked Joanie’s hand away as soon as they were safely on the sidewalk. He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. He had never really given it much thought before. Gram’s name was Martha, but she had always been Gram. And Evie was their grandmother, too, but they had always, always called her Evie, never Grandma or Grammy or Gram. “I don’t know,” he said again.
    Names were funny things. His certainly was. His name was Frederick, but everyone called him Spoon. He hated it when he had to tell someone the story of his name. “ Spoon? ” people would say upon hearing his name for the first time. They always had the same pinched look on their faces. Many people had tried to guess the origin of his name, but none had ever guessed correctly. He doubted if anyone ever would.
    One morning, when Spoon’s mother was pregnant with him, she decided to plant some peonies in the side yard. The peonies had been divided from a plant of Gram’s and were at least a half a century old. Kay had only been digging for minutes when her shovel hit something that clinked. She bent down, reached into the shallow hole, and found a tarnished baby spoon peeking out of the dirt. A young, lanky boy with thick curls, wearing a sailor suit and holding a hobbyhorse, was embossed on the handle of the spoon, and the name Frederick was engraved into the back of the handle in an elegant script. As Kay cleaned the spoon with the hem of her gardening smock, she felt the baby kick for the first time. She made up her mind then and there that if her baby was a boy, he would be named Frederick.
    Following Frederick’s birth, friends and neighbors asked where his name had come from. Was he named for an uncle? A great-grandfather? After telling the story time and again, Scott and Kay started calling Frederick “Spoon Baby” and then simply “Spoon.” Charlie took to it quickly. Spoon, or “Poon” as he pronounced it, rolled off his two-year-old tongue with much greater ease than did Frederick. He loved the ooooo sound. Soon Spoon was the only name anyone called the baby, and now when Spoon heard the name Frederick it barely registered with him, barely caused his head to turn. Sometimes, when he was asked, he lied and said that Spoon was a nickname for Spooner, his given name, an old family name on his mother’s side.
    The spoon lay on Kay’s dresser amid a dusty jumble—hairpins, rubber bands, foreign coins, beads, stone fruit. “I’ll give it to you,” she told him once, “when you’re old enough for it to mean something to you.”
    â€œThere he is!” Joanie said all of a sudden. “There’s Pa!”
    Down the block, beyond a parked car and through some bushes, Spoon could see his grandfather. He was carrying a garbage can to the curb.
    Joanie ran ahead.
    When Spoon reached the front walk, Joanie was already in Pa’s arms. “We’re here to work on the project!” she announced.
    Spoon blushed. He unrolled and rolled the top of the bag of vegetables; the lettuce leaves were squashed and wilted.
    Pa put Joanie down. “That’s funny,” he said. “As it turns out I do have a project. And I can use all the help I can get. I’m cleaning out the garage.”
    â€œSo that’s the project,” Joanie said gleefully, winking at Spoon.
    Spoon sighed with relief. What a coincidence! He could barely believe his good fortune. Now Joanie would be completely occupied and he could do what he needed to do. Maybe he’d even find something of Gram’s in the garage. He and Pa greeted each other with a hug. Spoon handed over the bag of vegetables, and then they walked up the driveway to the garage side by side.

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    W ITHIN MINUTES , J OANIE WAS BUSY sweeping the garage floor. Periodically she used the broom